The Sacramento Bee-"Kids, parents pitch in as Oak Park charter school gets results"
By Deepa Ranganathan
November 27, 2005

Shana Brye's son was in the second grade when his teacher said he couldn't learn.

"She told me point-blank: There's nothing you can do," Brye said.

Brye didn't like that message. She took her son out of his Elk Grove school and transferred him to Public School #7, a charter school in Sacramento's Oak Park neighborhood.

"I knew he'd be academically challenged," she said. "This year we've seen a turnaround."

Now in its third year, PS7 is part of a fledgling movement to turn education into a marketplace with many sellers. Charter schools, advocates argue, create options for families who can't afford private school - and in the process, force district schools to compete for students.

In California, charter schools for the most part must accept all applicants. The schools are public but operate free from many of the regulations that bind school districts. In exchange, they are accountable to a district, county or state board for getting the results promised in a written contract, or charter. If they fail to do so, they can be shut down.

The notion has proved popular across the political spectrum: 40 states have passed charter school laws since 1992. There are 3,600 such schools serving more than a million children across the country. California accounts for a sixth of the schools, serving one-fifth of those children.

This fall, more than 80 new charter schools opened in California. Sacramento County now has 33, Placer County five, and El Dorado County seven, according to the California Charter School Association.

In some ways, PS7, a 280-student school run by the nonprofit St. HOPE Public Schools, is an example of what charter schools do best: use their autonomy to place stricter demands on parents, teachers and students.

Students at PS7, most of them African American and many of them poor, work longer hours and have fewer days off than do kids in typical district schools. Parents sign a pledge promising to read to students at night and spend 40 hours a year volunteering at the school.

The payoff: The school posted an impressive 99-point leap last year in its Academic Performance Index scores, a key state indicator of performance.

The school currently hosts kindergarten through sixth grade, but administrators hope to add a seventh and eighth grade over the next two years. The goal is to feed PS7's students directly into Sacramento Charter High School, also operated by St. HOPE.

"We want to play a major role in education reform and social justice," said Herinder Pegany, PS7's principal. "We want the very best for children who often have the very worst of everything."

But PS7 also is open to many of the same criticisms that charter schools have faced since the inception of the movement. The campus is more racially segregated than those of nearby district schools. And some complain that by drawing the kinds of involved parents whose children would do well anywhere, the school leaves other campuses in the Sacramento City Unified School District to tackle the "tough cases."

"When you have parents going out of their way to choose a school, watch over the school very closely and be involved in the school, that is a huge indicator of a child's success in school," said Marcie Launey, president of the Sacramento City Teachers Association. "If we could get that from every parent in the district, our children would be on the road to success."

Though state law requires the school's student body to mirror that of Sacramento City Unified, PS7 looks like neither the district nor the diverse neighborhood around it. Nine out of 10 students are African American, while nearby district schools serve a broader mix of Latino, black, Asian and white students.

What's more, English language learners make up only about 5 percent of the student body, Pegany said. The number is closer to 40 percent at nearby schools.

Pegany says he doesn't know why his school doesn't look more like its neighborhood.

"Really, it's open to everybody," he said. "We went door to door to door. We canvassed the whole community. ... Sometimes people are a little more hesitant to jump in on something that's new."

Members of the Sacramento City Unified school board, which oversees PS7's charter, said the school's demographics are worth a second look but aren't a major cause of concern.

"I'm especially pleased that PS7 is serving a high percentage of African Americans and having the success they're having," said board member Rick Jennings. "They are showing African Americans can learn at the same rate as other students that have been successful in the district. That is very, very encouraging."

There's no consensus on how effective charter schools are. That's partly because the schools share few common traits, and partly because the science of evaluating schools is still in its infancy, according to a University of Washington study released Monday.

But Pegany said that PS7 is achieving results that can't be chalked up to parent involvement alone. "The vast majority of our students," he said, "have never really had success in school."

And the people at PS7 - the parents, teachers and administrators - say the school has high expectations for students whom other schools often dismiss.

"He didn't want to go to school," said Crystal Hannah as her 8-year-old son, Tahir Jones, played in the cafeteria after school. "The teacher didn't seem to care. She kept wanting to hold him back."

Now, she said, "he loves his teacher. He sits and does his homework."

Standing in the entryway, parent Jonathan Murry pointed to the signs that hang next to each classroom. One, hanging next to a fourth-grade room, reads "Class of 2018": the year those students are expected to graduate from college.

"They're really getting kids at an early age to think about college. A lot of schools don't even do that," he said.

Principal Pegany said the school's success lies in a mix of aggressive assessment, early intervention and hard work.

Students are in class eight hours a day, sometimes longer. Struggling students - as well as their teachers - give up their fall and spring breaks to work on reading and math skills.

The school tracks individual progress with weekly assessments. Pegany has a color-coded chart in his office that breaks down each student's performance on state tests.

"We expect every child to grow one and a half years in reading every year. It takes a lot of work to do that," he said.